


skies of blue (and birds of yellow)

by blacktreacle



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Barista Zayn, Cruel fate, I go where you go, I tried to make something beautiful, M/M, Soulmates, Terminal Illnesses, Till Death Do Us Part, Tragedy, True Love, beautiful but tragic, seasonal love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 14:41:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19297822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacktreacle/pseuds/blacktreacle
Summary: I had whispered it to him at first, in a hazy, sleep-like state. I imagined it to be like the first breath you take as a babe, straight from your mother’s womb. Breathless, and yet all you know. I love you. It was as easy as blinking; easier still. There wasn’t a second thought in my mind of it. I had never been more sure of anything.His smile encompassed the room, filled the streets below with a flood of light. He said it back effortlessly, as if his tongue had harboured the words since the dawn of time. I loved him, but he swore he loved me more. And for once, for the first time in my life, I found myself believing.(au where the world is black and white, until you meet your soulmate.)





	skies of blue (and birds of yellow)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this earlier today bc I wad feeling sappy (my heart is a little broken over fictional characters at the moment and the hopelessness is just pouring out). it's sad :( but also beautiful, if you like the whole 'finding beauty in tragedy' thing, like I do.
> 
> I don't usually write things in first person, and I don't think I've read a fanfic in first person for a long time. but it was the only way it could have worked with the style i was going for. give it a go!
> 
> based on a post on instagram about soulmates (that i cannot find now). 
> 
> you can find me on tumblr @treacleblack  
> happy pride month!!

I saw him, for the first time, in May. It seemed so strange that his eyes were blue; the blue I’d only ever heard from in books; the blue of the sky or the sea.  Such a wonder through the bleak common that didn’t consume me until after he was gone. My hands were blue, too. Small rivers that pumped underneath my skin. No one had ever seen him before.

Time came swiftly and forgotten, and yet nothing else around me seemed to change. The nights, as winter came and went, were deeper with shadow, and as spring arrived the sun seemed particularly bright, peaking through white clouds. Sometimes, I would sit and stare at my hands, and watch the blood pulse close to the surface of my skin. I had read that blood was red, and the blue was simply an illusion of Artemis herself. But a part of me couldn’t help but question whether it was a type of magic. Did my heart sing a different tune? I couldn’t be the only one.

My blood was no trick but the trick of my eyes.

“You have considered the possibility, yes?” The doctor asked.

Of course, I had. One cannot read and _not_ stumble upon stories. One could not be born without their parents telling it beside the beds like a myth as you drifted off to sleep. And yet, myth oftentimes is factual.

But I was not in love. Nor was I of age.

“It’s possible. There are rarities, but those rarities do exist.”

The pills he prescribed me were deep blue, too, though I could only faintly see it’s colour by the reflection through the glass in my hand. It tasted as nothing and caused my eyes to flutter shut. When I woke, the sun was bright shadow on the horizon. My hands were no longer blue. Colour, as if only a myth that dreams could grant life to, vanished.

I did not see him again until the summer. Only fleeting through a crowd, but his eyes caught mine like a flare of infrared light upon a sharp corner. His lashes closed over, and he was gone. And like sunshine after bitter rain, colour reappeared with a vengeance. Blue, deeper this time, and purple, too. Vined grapes along the gardens tasted sweeter. The lavenders on the riverbed smiled at me, and I brought them home.

In the morning, I walked through a town that I had not been through before. It existed, only to me then, like a new painting discovered with broken knowledge. The sky was cloudless and illuminated by the white orb. My hands closed around a Book of Colours in a bookstore at the heart of the city, and my eyes scourged every page until they couldn’t stay open. Though the colours remained blank shades of black and white, I memorised the names by heart.

Cerulean. His eyes were cerulean.

The town whispered about him. Girls in long summer dresses, and merchants who keened at his humility. To them, he was brightness. But he was more. A star. A lightening bolt that struck life into the height of a shadowed town.

But despite the talk, I did not see him. He was but a rumour whistling through the streets like wind. Even my feet had changed course to pass by where the villagers had said he resided, and yet when I reached the hill there seemed to be no course of life where he would have lived. He was but a scent in the air I was not privy to understanding. I wondered if, in my dreary corner of the world, I had imagined him entirely. The villagers spoke of him kindly, though as I thought, no kinder than they would a charming dog.

My doctor doubled my dosage. In the morning, my colour was gone.

The Book of Colours collected dust upon my shelf. Despite how much I wanted to dispose it, I couldn’t bring myself to do so. The names of the colours stuck in my mind like something too haunting to forget. Faceless names that seemed only hallucinations in my colourless world.

Life is simpler without colour. Perhaps that’s why the God’s allowed it to be. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I new some terrible secret that others did not. That I was harbouring knowledge—even from myself—which gave the world a strange vibrancy, of likes I’d never seen before. Life without colour was simpler, but the grays of my shirt, and the colourless sky outside the walls of my home were a disparate land that did not seem worthy to explore. The pills snickered in my hand and glided like stones down my throat.

“Nasty things, aren’t they?” Harry said to me. “I could sleep whole days once I’d taken them.”

Whilst I had mourned the sliver shedding of colour from my world, Harry gleamed brighter than the sun. His world was filled with the smaragdines and the fuchsias and the tangerines that I had despaired of. He instilled within me, as I looked at him, a sense of regret I hadn't felt before. His eyes were so bright. It was a consequence of love, or, as Harry put it, a blessing. To see the world in the way it was created to be seen. The sunsets, the realms of outer consciousness, the warmth of a lover’s embrace.

Though I had trouble believing his words, my heart beat erratically in my chest, as if longing for that just out of reach.

"When I met Louis, people told us we were too young. That it was impossible. And even though I didn't believe them, I tried to make myself hate him. It only ended up making me love him more." He said, “Take the pills, but don’t sleep. Stay awake as long as you can. Watch the world bloom. No pill can stand in the way of what Destiny wants.”

The world of colour that had once stroked me gently, but brought an intense, and more beautiful, contrivance instead, as Harry had said, returned to me like it had been stolen in the night. 

He appeared out of nowhere, as if the heavens had opened and on a chariot he brought down, shining like the sun. His eyes were that same cerulean that, at one point in time unbeknownst to me, I had fallen madly for, and when he spoke, words trickled like honey from his lips. I don’t remember what words he spoke—we had had so many conversations since—but his eyes and mine, in that moment, were one.

It hadn’t occurred to me, until I returned home that night, to see what the colour of my own eyes were. What I had known to be black before was now a deep and rich brown, haloing as I turned into the light a golden shimmer of green. Did he see what I saw, or were my eyes, to him, like they were to a commoners perception—pale light shrouded by dullness. He had not made any indication that he was surprised by what he saw. I had heard, in the copious research my sleepless mind could rattle, that those chemicals miracles were not an attestation to the finding of two wandering souls, lost across the great expanse of the earth. There were sometimes pieces of a puzzle that did not fit. And overtime, the sorrow that had passed through these people tainted the colour until it rotted away.

He had not made any indication that he was surprised by what he saw.

Yet despite my indulgence into doubt, I could not cease my wonder. I had not seen his eyes so clearly; they had never seemed so blue. Beautifully lurid blue—not like the ocean, or the sky like I had imagined—lighter, brighter, and more full of a world I had not seen before. The blue pansies in the field, streaked with deeper lines like those that were imprinted on the side of my thighs. Like the sun, and rays radiated it’s warmth.

I stumbled upon him by accident, skipping stones across the riverbed. His back was turned to me, but the soft brunette of his hair, even from my distance, seemed fit for a hand to smooth along it. His skin was beige as it had come to me in my dreams; lighter than mine—the white of his shirt had proven how kind the sun was to him. I left my eyes only for a moment, to pick some of the hyacinths blooming late in the deep grasses, but when I lifted my head, he was gone. I felt suddenly cold. 

My twentieth birthday rolled past quicker than I remembered of the years before. The village chef baked me pastries and sweet delicacies I hadn’t known since childhood, and the neighbour’s children wrote me a card filled with sweet, childish nothings that made me smile. Many presents came, and yet the greatest gift I felt had been with me for some time. Harry drank wine with me along the beach, and for the first time since we had known one another, we revelled in the true beauty of the sunset together, half-dazed, and completely drunk on the wonder of the world he now could share with me.  

I dissolved my pills in the sink.

We saw each other again, when the last weeks of summer readied themselves to be gone. We were in the strawberry fields, picking last of the seasons sweet fruits. His hair, painted by the sun, had turned blond at the tips. Small curls dappled where it was overgrown and tickled his neck. My heart squealed like I had eaten a fruit too sweet. I longed to take a step forward, and another until I met him in the middle, where he would look at me, full of colour that must be new to him, too, and smile. But his eyes met mine from across the hazy field, squinting under the sunlight, and looked away.

He takes his coffee sweet with three sugars. Only once on that day had I served him, but I remembered. I frowned indignantly in my corner of the counter, my back turned to him, as the barista made the same mistake she had before. She flustered, but he smiled at her and was gracious like the gossips said he was. Wherever he went, a trail of light followed, and everyone present could do nothing but stare until the monotony of our lives returned neutrality.

A part of me, like a limb dipped in a pool of dread, wondered if he was simply a miracle key to unlocking a new world. The prospect of uniqueness has always been a part of human history, and knowing it could be stolen from me so easily—when I had learned to flatter my life with the notion—seemed as though I was falling from a cliff with no hand to pull me up. Harry had warned me that a full heart was the centre of all drama in the universe. But I could not help it. I had already fallen into a trap of letting myself believe that I was unique to him, and to climb out now seemed an impossible feat.

I had already fallen. Could I live in a world where he did not look at me like I was the sun? Was there a point of climbing out of the whole at all, when the earth might have been kinder to me down there?

Autumn came in aggressive tones of colours that would make summer weep, if it were still alive to see it. I had not seen him in a month, and whilst my heart felt heavy, I couldn’t ignore the suspicion that I might purposefully be running away. Aggrandizing my self-pity was seemingly something only I had the time for. Not even the world had patience for me, as it took the sun in the early evenings and left me reeling with darkness. Even in the still of night, the world was more beautiful than it had ever been, with the promise of a new day rising slowly over the horizon.

Night was a sworn oath that colour would return again.

But somewhere in the stillness of routine, of deactivating and rebooting, of little effort to seek the gratitude which should have stayed in my heart for the new wonders I had found, things had started to fall apart.

I had not noticed the sapphire slowly turn livid, or the water slow until a deep abyss remained. My skin had changed pale, but the annual departing of the sun declared it so normal I had not blinked twice.

One morning I woke, fallen asleep only in the early hours of morning, when the birds began to rise, and I waited for the sky to sing. But it did not sing to me. The film of sea that concealed the stars remained silent in my presence. It’s hues of golden yellows and bronzes and decadent fruits were remains left over from a war with Fate, and with it were replaced by those black and grays that dislocated my happiness. Only faint semblance of colour remained, fading as quickly as my heart raced each moment even quicker than the moment before.

The remnants of my pills lay chalky to the surface of my sink—I pulled my finger over the ceramic to check, the tip turning white with powder. I had not taken my tablets in months. I had turned to my closet to find my favourite shirt not the maroon it usually sprang with, but a charcoal gray that glared at me. I checked canvas stained with paint I displayed, and the multitudinous wall of kaleidoscopic flowers I had collected on my travels through the mountains.

My world had returned to the liveliness of death that had honoured me before love had arrived. 

My house, as dull as ever, with its thick, Victorian floors, could not hold me. I was a bang of sharp splintered wood that made a hole in the floor as hollow as the hole in my chest, as I fell. I kept falling. Everything was black and white, and a blur of gray whilst my mind spun, racing, searching with desperate grasps to find something that had escaped me, that seemed to never have existed at all.

It was as if two hearts beat in my chest, falling slowly out of sync until they lost one another. One beating as fast as the speed of light, and the other, drowning. A small incision in the centre of my body tore and tore until I split apart, exposed to the haunted air that dug its claws in deep. In madness, in deep breaths and lungs of fire, a moment I had first mistaken for the end of my life, clarity had found me. A space within my chest understood why the world seemed to set alight around me, burn mercilessly like paper, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I would never. That space is a place where words do not belong.

I stumbled mindlessly through streets that yesterday lay bare, stone like sand and bricks like castles, merchant rooves painted fuego, luck charms like shells from the sea. My mind was a fuzz of mourning, my heart splitting further apart, but my soul wandered with incentive. Even if I wanted, I could not stop. My feet, bare on the floor, scraped at the heels, were entranced with a higher power that brought me closer to destiny.

My heart only perked it’s head at the lights reminiscent of childhood fear. Hostile and clinical, tiles underneath soothing. The rain had started, and my ragged clothes left a trail of water behind me as I rushed to where, I did not know. But my heart incessantly moved, nodding, as if now only understanding. She pounded in my ears and blinded me. People around called my name. I caught the stairs three at a time. No concept of gravity fooled me. I had lost the world I built overnight, but these ruins were familiar.

He lay in a bed on the fourth floor, barely breathing. I stopped in the doorway, as if by a force field. Fear. The door lay open. Like the line where the rain must end, I basked in nothingness whilst the room, enclosed with the space of him, exploded with colour. The seating chair was deep brown, and the lights were too yellow too look at. His skin was pale and hued with purple-blue bruises along the soft expanses of his skin. A canvas painted black beside him reflected the strength of his heart with harsh, fragmented lines of green. I almost could not step into the room, dread cementing me to the floor that not long ago had tried to swallow me whole. I looked, but his eyes were closed. I feared that I would curse the life that lay before me if my feet touched the floor, that the colour would shatter before me if I moved.

One step came slowly, the one after even slower. The products on the floor burned my nose, and the pounding of my heart deafened any senses or danger that could have knocked me down.

“Well, finally,” his voice distilled calm into the quiet, though it hurt him, I could tell. Even then. It stung me, too. 

Despite his fatigue, his eyes were bright and full of life. A gateway unlocked and allowed air into my lungs. I could breathe again. I approached the bed with hesitant breaths, fingers picking at one another.

“You were waiting for me?” I asked.

He smiled and motioned for me to come closer. I took his hand in mine when he asked, and sat beside the bed where he could view, through my eyes, the fathomless love that diffused like electric through my skin.

“I’ve been waiting for months.”

I saw him, for the first time, in May. It seemed so strange that his eyes were blue; the blue I’d only ever heard from in books; the blue of the sky or the sea. It was the first week in May—I remember the dawning of the early summer sun and the smell of fresh fruit that the heat of the season had produced.

His name was Liam. He was raised in a town off the coast across the sea. An instinct had travelled him across the great expanse of what he had already seen as deep blue—he watched the dolphins swim, and the mermaids sing in the early morning—and to this small town of nowhere.

I had met Liam in May, but he had met me at the first snow fall in winter. He called it a spark that struck him, through the glass of the window he had seen me, smiling down at a child who played a magic trick for me, and the further he departed from me, the number his body had felt.

He had wandered into the forest and watched the trees change green, and the berries on the mistletoe grew red before his eyes. He had not slept for days; his brain was too wired for sleep.

“Everyday?” I asked. I could not hide my smile.

“I counted down the days until you’d spot me. But you never did. You were too engrossed in your own world. I loved watching you. You were the light that a dull winter needed to survive until the spring.”

I had forgotten that contentment had existed before love became everything that I knew. Black and white had never harmed me, until I discovered that there was something more. Perhaps it was curiosity that had killed my will for a normal life. But how could I go back, when such delirious and wonderful conjecture had made normality feel like a death sentence?

Liam took my hand in his and squeezed me close, as if I might disappear. He was better with everyday that passed, but his fear resonated on me like a bad dream. He was afraid. I promised him I would stay, but nothing seemed to satiate the fear in his chest. What made the hole, he would not tell me, and, no matter how I tried, I could not guess.

I had whispered it to him at first, in a hazy, sleep-like state. I imagined it to be like the first breath you take as a babe, straight from your mother’s womb. Breathless, and yet all you know. _I love you._ It was as easy as blinking; easier still. There wasn’t a second thought in my mind of it. I had never been more sure of anything. 

His smile encompassed the room, filled the streets below with a flood of light. He said it back effortlessly, as if his tongue had harboured the words since the dawn of time. I loved him, but he swore he loved me more. And for once, for the first time in my life, I found myself believing.

We held each other into long nights. The bed beside him in the room became my own until the space between us in the cold nights became unbearable. We stayed even once his bruises had disappeared. He was ashamed of the way that he walked, but I could only be endeared.

His shy smiles stirred in me some notion deeper than love. I wanted to feather my fingers into his hair and lull him into sleeps where he would fall for me deeper. I wanted to wake every morning to his confessions he would press within me. I wanted to kiss every inch of his skin until the end of time. I wanted to lay beside him, his hand in mine, our souls exposed to the weight of the world, and feel our hearts intertwine.

There was no one in the world but him. He was my colour, my essence, my longing for each breath.

In the beginning of spring, we walked for the first time together as lovers. The sand was between our toes. The sun was hiding but the air was arm. His walking had improved, though, I feared, mostly by an intense desire to not humiliate himself in front of me—a disastrous thing I dared believe he could ever be capable of. His breathing was heavy, and he had grown more shadowed with each day, but I loved him with every part of me. The soft spring air had instilled within him the life he had lost in the many months between the dull walls of hospital beds.

We dabbled in foods I packed, and played cards on a blanket beside the beach front. We watched the frothing of the waves and said goodbye to the tide. The crescent moon awakened in the sky when the sun became too tired from the day. We drank wine and watched the stars, though the nurses said he couldn’t. It didn’t matter anymore. We were living only for ourselves in our moment of heaven, and the world was witness.

We made love between the rocks and the tide. There was no one in the world but us. I kissed him, in all the places he desired, and dusted him with the love that he deserved. He was more delicate than I could ever have imagined, and in my arms, below my heart, he was divine. We floated through the stars and when we returned, the earth trembled in fear of the bounty of our love.

“When I go, I’ll be up there,” he said to me, soft voice, cracked from whines of passion.

My eyes could not have been any more adoring.

“Promise me, you won’t leave me.”

“Not for too long.”

I intertwined our hands. He kissed my palm. I never wanted to let go.

“Wait for me.”

_“Always.”_

I thought I loved him more than he loved me. I fooled myself into believing that, if I loved him enough, he would stay. I watched the stars move long after he fell asleep, retraced the stories. I watched him—the softness of his face, his deep breaths, the flickering of his eyes of a bad thought I stroked away with my fingers across his cheek. I could not stop watching him. I feared every time I looked at him, it would be the last. There was no one in the world I could have wanted more.

The first of the spring flowers bloomed along the rock coves along the beach, where the last of the forest died away. I had placed them beside his bedside table, hoping to make him happy. But the effort it took for him to smile was not worth the pain it caused. He smiled, because he loved me. They were the most beautiful flowers he had ever seen. I promised that I would take him to pick his own once the rest had bloomed. He stared at each one, felt each petal between his fingers, as though it were the last time.

He took my hand in his, his eyes glossy in the sunset. “Follow me to the stars,” he said.

He was so beautiful. I lathered him with love and passion, knowing each second was closer to the greeting Fate, and sang to him in sleep.

When the rest of the flowers bloomed, I walked along them like it was home. My fingers bristled against the petals; my fingers tuned to be as gentle as the touch of a ghost. I had to—I never wanted to hurt him. The delicate pollen remained swollen with vibrancy, the petals alive with colour. His jacket cloaked me. I think, in the end, I could have fit both of us inside. _Hide with me. Let’s stay here, forever._

I walked along the beach endlessly, my destination long lost and found. I could not count the tears that left me. I could not tell the time that passed. I wanted nothing but to encompass myself into the ground and find him. The sea still rolled those waves of cerulean against my feet, each touch a caress against my heart. The flowers remained unpicked, and the sun turned to dusk. 

I would love him, even when I was nothing but stardust. I would love him until the end of time. The softness of the sand on my feet took me home. Even in death, my colour remained. He loved me, still.

 


End file.
